Sol House Provides Shelter And Second Chances For Teens In Trouble

By Kelly Corrigan

Illustrations By Jill Hamilton

Just 19 years old, she had spent the past seven months living from house to house in Centralia and Columbia. Moving in with an older brother and his roommates did little to quell the distractions in her life. Anne* was looking for stability. When her mother suffered a series of health-related drawbacks that left her spending nights at Columbia’s Harbor House, Anne found a helping hand at Sol House, a transitional living facility in Columbia for young adults ages 16 through 21.

Anne was born in San Diego and moved with her family to the California towns of Joshua Tree and then Cambria before her mother relocated the family to Missouri, attracted by Columbia’s affordable cost of living and active lifestyle.

As a Hickman High School student, Anne ran with a partying crowd. At 16, she watched her father die from sclerosis of the liver after years of drugs use.

“I saw how he was fairly healthy, fairly active person just pretty much in a hospital bed with a whole bunch of tubes hooked up to him having to get fed through a tube in his throat,” she recalls.

To her closest friends at Hickman, Anne would say, “ ‘You guys can keep the drugs to yourself.’

“But I got into drinking socially,” she says. “I’d skip school to go over to one of my friend’s houses and have a small party there while we were supposed to be at school.”

In her sophomore year of high school, Anne dropped out, much to her mother’s disapproval. “I was in the mindset of, ‘I’m 17. I’m an adult. I’m going to do what I want to. I know everything’ – which I didn’t.”

In May, after two years of working minimum-wage jobs and living with friends, Anne turned to Sol House, which opened its doors in the fall of 2007. Sol House is the brainchild of Heather Windham, a social worker at Rainbow House who had received too many calls from couch-surfing 17-year-olds either kicked out of their homes or avoiding home to avoid abuse. Windham wrote a grant for federal funding on behalf of teens she had yet to meet.

“Depending on what organization you’re representing, a 17-year-old can be an adult or a child,” Windham says. “The system was hesitant to get involved since they were kind of, almost an adult.”

To receive emergency services, one has to be 18, Windham says. To get public housing, one also has to be 18.

“They weren’t quite children and they weren’t quite adults,” she says.

Sol House has served 27 young adults since opening. With admission to the facility comes expectations and freedom to grow. Attention to curfew is a must, and so is a list of immediate goals that require accountability from Sol House residents.

At orientation, Windham addresses the newest young adult:

“Do you currently feel like a girl or a woman? You’re going to have days here that you’re not going to like it,” she warns. “But by the end of it, you will feel like a woman.”

Residents can choose to leave Sol House at any time. Windham says the average stay is five to six months; the goal of Sol House is to become a bridge linking its residents to a steady job, school and stable housing.

Each day, residents must sign in and out, listing 40 hours of productivity each week.

“There are some days I walk in, in the morning,” Windham says, “And I see they’re all signed out to work, school, doctor’s appointment, grocery shopping, and my heart swells and I’m like, ‘Yes!’ ” But, she says, if by 11 a.m., half of them are still asleep or they missed their appointment for General Education Development prep class, she has to work to keep them on track and focused.

Sometimes staying focused is a push, Windham says. “We get concerned when they get distracted by negative peers or some idea that could lead them away from their goals.”

Every Tuesday, the residents gather in the evening for a life skills class and then a community meal. Sol House invites community members to talk to the residents about topics such as budgeting, safe sex and healthy eating. The approach, says counselor John Paul Perez, is not to tell the residents what to do.

“It’s our job not to give them goals,” he says. Instead, Windham instructs the counselors to weigh options with the residents and ultimately empower them to make their own positive decisions.

Anne says she’s already seen a change in herself. “I’ve started to become a lot more responsible for my actions,” she says.

Anne has actively applied for jobs and has enrolled in GED classes. She has her eyes on Columbia College in the hope of attaining a dual degree in education and psychology.

Like Windham, Perez and his fellow counselors say they only want the best for Anne and other Sol House residents.

“It’s so hard not to feel empathy,” he says. “I don’t pity them. They deserve an opportunity to have a second chance, a third, fourth and fifth chance. They just deserve a chance to grow.”

*Name has been changed to protect the anonymity of this Sol House resident.